It looks like Mr. Lincoln made more than one "offer" to the South for a conditional peace:
Source for the following excerpt:
amren.com/archives/back-issues/may-2010/#article1
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Lincoln’s priorities
Unlike the radical Republicans, Lincoln never thought of slaveholders as moral inferiors, even saying they were “just what we would be in their situation.” He was related by marriage to Confederates. His wife, Mary Todd, came from a family of 14 children, six of whom supported the North and eight supported the South. One of his wife’s sisters was married to a Confederate general.
Virtually until the end of the war, Lincoln supported gradual, compensated emancipation coupled with colonization — on the initiative of the states, but with federal support. Late in 1861, for example, he proposed a compensated abolition program for Delaware that would have been so gradual that some blacks would have remained slaves into the 20th century. The state legislature did not act on it.
Lincoln thought slavery was wrong but that a society with large numbers of free blacks living among whites was just as wrong. Gradual emancipation coupled with colonization would solve both problems. In 1861, he persuaded Congress to pass a resolution in favor of colonization, but nothing came of it.
In August 1862, Lincoln invited black leaders to the White House — the first time blacks ever came in an official capacity — to ask them to persuade their people to emigrate. As Prof. Escott explains: “He accepted as a fact that the racial problem in America was profound and intractable; he wanted to end the conflict between white Americans and reunite the sections; and he favored the removal of black Americans as a solution.”
Lincoln’s reputation as “the Great Emancipator” rests mainly on the proclamation, but Prof. Escott points out that this document is hardly a ringing endorsement of liberty. As is well known, it promised freedom only to those slaves in Confederate-controlled territory, which is to say, to those slaves over whom Lincoln had no power.
It is less well known that what is called the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued on Sept. 22, 1862, offered the Confederate states 100 days to stop the fighting and send representatives to Congress. Any state that did so was urged to enact compensated emancipation, with funds to be paid from the US treasury. Blacks so freed would be encouraged to emigrate. However, emancipation was to be strictly a matter to be determined by the states, and any state that returned to the union could keep slavery intact. It was only if the southern states persisted in war that the slaves under their control would be freed. As the Cincinnati Gazette explained, “The way to save Slavery is simply to submit to the Constitution. . . . The way to destroy it is to persist in rebellion.”
At that time and repeatedly thereafter, Lincoln stated that the proclamation was strictly a war measure designed to weaken the South’s capacity to fight. He did not draft it in anything like the orotund phrases of which he was capable and thereby make it a monument to liberty. If anything, it reads like a bill of lading. At the same time, Lincoln was so solicitous of the cooperation of border state slave-holders that he exempted Kentucky and Tennessee from the proclamation, even though parts of those states were under Confederate control and would therefore have been subject to emancipation. As he explained, “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps save the Union.” Professor Escott summarizes the three central themes of Lincoln’s thinking at this time about blacks: “that freedom was not an object but a means of victory; that colonization was a major goal; and that no ideas of racial equality were being entertained.”
In his annual message of December 1862, Lincoln called on Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment that would direct the federal government to compensate any state that abolished slavery during the next 37 years, up until the year 1900. He even provided for the possibility that a state might reintroduce slavery after having first abolished it, but that would require repaying any compensation received. The amendment went nowhere, but shows the tentative, leisurely pace at which Lincoln was prepared to free slaves.
Lincoln eventually approved raising black troops but he took some convincing. In the fall of 1862 he complained that “if we were to arm them [blacks], I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.”
In his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction of December 1863, Lincoln drew up a road map for future Southern race relations. It included “apprenticeships” and “peonage” for freed blacks that would have been little different from slavery. His only requirement seemed to be that no slaves freed under the Emancipation Proclamation be reenslaved outright.
In a famous conversation reported by General Ben Butler but not otherwise confirmed, Lincoln was still talking about colonization at a time when the war was nearly won. In April 1865, he told the general it would be best for both blacks and whites if blacks could be sent away to some foreign land with a warm climate. At about the same time, he also expressed a mild “preference” that the most intelligent blacks might, under certain circumstances, be allowed to vote. Never in his life did Lincoln talk about social or political equality for blacks.
Prof. Escott devotes a dozen fascinating pages to the Hampton Roads peace conference of Feb. 3, 1865. Lincoln, along with his Secretary of State, William Seward, met with three Confederate representatives, including Vice President Alexander Stephens. No official records were kept of the discussions, but later accounts make it clear that even at this late date, Lincoln’s only non-negotiable demand was peace and reunification. Slavery was still an option. He again held out the possibility of making federal money available to compensate slaveholders for their property. By then, the 13th amendment had already been voted by Congress, but Lincoln suggested that if the Confederate states laid down their weapons and rejoined the Union they could vote as they pleased on the amendment, possibly defeating it. He even proposed the possibility of “prospective” approval of the amendment, or ratification to take place at some future date. This would have avoided what he called the “many evils” of immediate emancipation.
These reports from the conference show that even with the war nearly won, Lincoln was still thinking of ways to stop the killing and reunite the country, and was prepared to sacrifice the interests of blacks to those ends. It is far from certain whether he could have persuaded Congress to vote money for compensation, and some believe he was promising more than he could deliver in the hope of tricking the Confederates into stopping the war. In any case, his priorities at Hampton Roads were what they had always been: Union first, with blacks only a consideration to that end.
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